The Chosen cover art

The Chosen

who pays the price of a writer's fame?

 Preview

Get 30 days of Standard free

£5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for £0.00
More purchase options

The Chosen

By: Elizabeth Lowry
Narrated by: Philip Bird
Try for £0.00

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £15.79

Buy Now for £15.79

Summary

 One Wednesday morning in November 1912 Thomas Hardy, an old man in ragged trousers, entombed by paper and increasingly estranged from his wife Emma, finds her dying in her bedroom. Between his speaking to her and taking her in his arms she has gone.

The day before he and Emma had exchanged bitter words, leading Hardy to wonder whether all husbands and wives ended up as enemies to each other. He, his family and Florence Dugdale, the much younger woman with whom he had been in a relationship, all assumed that he would be happy and relieved to be set free. But he is left shattered by the loss.

Hardy finds a set of secret diaries Emma kept about their life together and discovers what Emma had truly felt - that he had been cold, remote and incapable of ordinary human affection and had kept her childless, a virtual prisoner for forty years. Why had they ever married?

He is consumed by something worse than grief, an absence without form or meaning, a chaos in which certainties have been obliterated. He must re-evaluate himself and reimagine his unhappy wife as she was when they first met.

Hardy's pained reflections on the choices he has made - and must now make - form a unique combination of love story and ghost story, by turns tender, surprising, comic and true. Based on meticulous research, The Chosen - the extraordinary new novel by Elizabeth Lowry - hauntingly searches the unknowable spaces between man and wife; memory and grief; life and art.

(P)2022 Quercus Editions Limited©2022 Elizabeth Lowry Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction Marriage Emotionally Gripping
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_c

Critic reviews

Does art enhance life, or negate it? The painful question runs through Lowry's portrait of Thomas Hardy, and produces a sombre, delicate novel, finely judged and full of insight (Hilary Mantel)
In The Chosen, Lowry conjures the torments of a writer's life wonderfully. It is full of understanding, shrewd and often lyrical - a thing of beauty and sadness. (Alison Light, author of Mrs Woolf & the Servants)
Elizabeth Lowry writes like a dream; finely attuned to the hopes, desires and secret hauntings of her characters, she brings them to life like no other writer I know. Every new book from Lowry is a rare treat, best devoured slowly. (Marina Benjamin)
'[A] novel which is both a fascinating analysis of Hardy and a powerful and exquisite work of art in its own right . . . her writing is utterly without mercy while also being underpinned by deep compassion . . . Lowry's view of marriage and, more particularly, the creative life is almost unbearably bleak, but her novel is glorious - the best that I have read in several years. (Alice Jolly)
Hardy's doomed first marriage is the subject of this beautifully rendered and poignant novel . . . The prose is exquisite . . . Above all, like many of the best novelists, Lowry understands the intricacies of the human heart.
In this exquisite imagining of the days after Emma's unexpected death, The ­Chosen excavates Hardy's emotions . . . Felled by the bitterness in her diaries . . .Hardy experiences 'a savage sense of liberty' and overwhelming feelings of loss, beautifully described in Lowry's bellclear, silvery prose.
This novel is exquisitely written and powerfully perceptive, yet never loses sight of its biographical nature.
Deserves to be read by anyone interested in Thomas Hardy or in good literature.
It's a remarkable, mesmeric piece of writing . . . an authentic cri de coeur from a deeply reserved man. There are utterly remarkable passages in The Chosen where something shifts, time seems to alter and language starts to glow. It's rare and quite extraordinary. It feels as though two levels of language like two currents of different salinity are flowing across each other - the sensation is one of looking through the 3rd person narration into Hardy's innermost lived experience, and through or behind those the further layer of the poems themselves, still fluid, in formation in the mind. (Andrew Greig, author of Rose Nicolson)
A stylistic tour de force . . . Miss this work of art -- and cautionary tale against long-term gaslighting -- at your peril.
All stars
Most relevant
What an incredible book! I want to listen to it again immediately. A gripping story and so well written. Absoutely heartbreaking. A huge achievement to find a way to present a very realistic picture of this marriage while doing both partners justice. It feels as though both have been liberated by the existence of this book. The hidden years of their marriage were overshadowed by the poems Hardy wrote about Emma after her death just as Emma's life had been overshadowed by his when she was alive. This book explores the dark mystery of so many long marriages in which love turns to estrangement, and brings both partners into the light.

Just wonderful

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I really enjoyed this book - the prose was beautiful. The story of a bleak marriage moving and sad

Fascinating insight

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.


This is astonishingly well read. A male reader speaking in a a woman’s voice is a fraught undertaking, but Philip Bird creates the voices of Thomas Hardy’s two wives, Emma Gifford and Florence Dugdale, with subtlety and absolute realism: an impressive achievement.

This is an admirable work inspired by the author’s intimacy with Thomas Hardy’s work and life allowing her to create the palpable reality of Hardy’s emotional turmoil immediately following the death of his first wife Emma in her attic retreat ignored and hurt in the cold prison of Max Gate. The relationships, the servants, wife-to-be Florence and Hardy’s family members are all skilfully created .
But a factual / fictional work is problematic – how much is factual and how much created by the author? I recognise lines from Hardy’s poems woven into the narrative and there’s a clever section where Hardy and Emma discuss Tess and Angel Clare with obvious reference to themselves, but Hardy’s subtly presented impotency being the reason for Emma being ‘denied’ a child is clearly the author’s own very reasonable creation. What else is and does it matter? Are the letters and journals left behind by Emma which form a considerable section of the book and which Hardy reads and finds himself skewered with all his cruel neglect fact or fiction? Perhaps there is a preface in the printed book which makes this clear. I think it does matter but it may not bother others.

It’s a very brave book and a very vivid one. So vivid and real is it that I found it both distressing (such a tragic marriage made up of all too real mutual disappointments!) and infinitely gloomy as Hardy drowned in guilt and sorrow recalling the images of what Emma had once been , as Hardy’s ‘friend’ young Florence Dugdale waited impatiently and unhappily in the Max Gate spare room for the old man to marry her. There is really nothing to brighten the heavy pall of gloom and regret.

Brilliantly done but not for you if you want cheering in any way!

The Return of the First Wife

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A totally believable insight into the heart and mind of the great writer, and a clear-eyed dissection of a marriage plagued by regret. Completely compelling.

A heart-rending dissection of a marriage.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Very well written and fairly well read, should have realised with the subject matter being Thomas Hardy how depressing it would turn out to be…

Probably not the novel to read in January

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.